British blues hard rockers Whitesnake managed to represent both the best and worst of the 1980s glam metal scene. The band, which dates back to 1978 as the next act for David Coverdale, who had just left Deep Purple, found itself at a crossroads by the early-to-mid ’80s. Their brand of working-class, blues-based hard rock had been eclipsed by the Sunset Strip pretty boys who put teased hair and spandex above actual musicianship.
By the time they hit the studio to record what would become their 1984 record, Slide It In, Coverdale decided to pivot away from the more soul- and funk-based sound they had been playing across their first five records and lean into more of the hard rock sound that was dominating both radio and MTV at the time. Craft Recordings has just re-released Slide It In, alongside its two follow-ups, 1987’s self-titled effort and 1989’s Slip of the Tongue.
These re-releases capture the band at a pivotal time, including its cultural and musical peak. Of the three, Slide It In, though ultimately a decent effort, is the weakest of the lot. From the never-even-trying-to-be-subtle album title to the front cover featuring a snake slithering into the cleavage of a woman, it was a pretty ham-fisted calling card for their new glam metal makeover (though perfectly in sync with the typically sophomoric and misogynistic themes that metal lived and breathed at the time). But for every lame double entendre like “Slide It In,” “Slow An’ Easy” and “Spit It Out,” there is a solid song like the bluesy “Give Me More” or the catchy “Hungry for Love.” The pivot worked remarkably well, making this the band’s biggest-selling album in the U.S. up to that point, only to be eclipsed four times over by their self-titled follow-up.
That album, also simply called 1987 by many, denoting the year it was released, finds the band not only embracing hair/glam metal completely (just check out Coverdale’s teased hair), but also helping make power ballads a genre must-have moving forward. Their music videos featuring Coverdale’s future wife (and future ex-wife), Tawny Kitaen, played ad nauseam on MTV. The three singles—“Still of the Night,” with its Led Zeppelin riffs; the maudlin “Is This Love”; and the infectious “Here I Go Again”—are all very much songs of their time, but also undeniably catchy. The goofy “Bad Boys” is probably the most skippable track on the album, but “Children of the Night,” one of the heaviest songs on the record, and the synth-heavy “Straight From the Heart” still sound remarkably strong for the genre four decades later.
The third album in this recent release, Slip of the Tongue, catches the band on its slide back down. Inexplicably, Coverdale seems to have switched his vocal style for a more Axl Rose-style falsetto. Nowhere is this more obvious than on the mundane title track that opens the album. The unimaginative “Kittens Got Claws” isn’t any better. The album’s three singles, the blues-soaked “Fool for Your Loving” and the back-to-back obligatory power ballads “Now You’re Gone” and “The Deeper the Love,” are all decent entries in the band’s song catalog. But the album is definitely a lot more uneven than the two records that preceded it. They would put out one more record before taking almost a decade off.
Taken together, these three reissues capture Whitesnake at the exact moment the band traded its blues-rock roots for teased hair, power ballads and MTV ubiquity and, for a short time, became one of the biggest acts in hard rock. Slide It In is the transitional record, still carrying traces of the band’s old sound beneath its increasingly juvenile glam-metal packaging. Whitesnake is the payoff, an almost perfectly calibrated collection of massive riffs, shamelessly emotional ballads and hooks built for arenas. Slip of the Tongue, meanwhile, shows just how quickly that formula could start producing diminishing returns.
There’s plenty here that has aged badly, from the sophomoric double entendres to the relentlessly sexualized imagery, and Whitesnake were hardly immune to the excesses that eventually, and quickly, made glam metal a punchline that persists to this day. But dismissing the band as another collection of teased-haired Sunset Strip poseurs misses what made them successful in the first place. Coverdale and company could actually play, and at their peak they could write enormous, ridiculously catchy hard-rock songs. These three albums capture both sides of Whitesnake: The talented blues-rock band who learned how to play the MTV game better than almost anyone, and the band who eventually became trapped by the very formula that made them stars.
Along with the standard-release black vinyl, Craft Recordings is issuing exclusive color pressings in “Tan Smoke” and “Stone Marble.” The label is also offering limited-edition color variants exclusively through their own webstore.
